Monday, October 26, 2015

Week of October 19, 2015

Letter of the Week:  
This week we will be working on the letter Pp.

A letter was sent home on Monday asking for you to supply a pumpkin. 
Thank you so much for sending in a pumpkin. We had so much fun with our pumpkins this week and will continue to work with them on Monday next week. 
They will be sent back home on Wednesday!
































* We carved a pumpkin on Wednesday and put LED lights inside to make it glow. We shut the blinds & the lights. Mrs. Clark came in and played the monster mash as we ate our snack. It was a spooky experience! All of the kids had a great time.









Star Word:
are
The star word and the letter person worksheet were sent home on Monday in your child's red folder.
The kindergarten teachers set up a pumpkin patch outside our window so that the students could go Pumpkin Picking for Star Words. They had a great time looking for star words and writing them on their clip board. When we got back to class we continued to practice writing our star words. We made them into "shooting stars" and each child had a chance to make the magnetic star fly onto the board. There were many chances to practice our words this week!











Since we have been practicing our star words and letters quite a bit in class, I will be sending home our latest letter name, letter sound, and star word assessment on Wednesday, October 28. Please practice any letters or words that are circled. 
Thank you!

 Skills  
In our Skills curriculum, students are being exposed to forming letters correctly. Each day we will learn a new letter sound. Students will: form the letter at the carpet, on a vertical surface and then in their skills book. With each letter, we will have fun activities dealing with the beginning sound.
 Some games are: riddles, I spy, Something That Sounds Like, Guess Who, Finish my sentence...
We will continue blending words every day to gain mastery in this area.
Letters that we will be forming this week are:
m, a, t, d
A chaining folder will also be introduced after letter 't'. Students will spell words using our chaining folder. This is a great resource which helps students to separate sounds that they hear in a word.
Words we will be spelling are: mat, at, mad, dad, tad, add...

Writing 
During Writing Workshop we'll continue using our ABC book. Shared writing will be used to help model forming letters close together when they are in a word. Star Words will be used to form sentences. During writing workshop we will write pumpkin stories. 
On Wednesday I modeled making a list (on the board) as we carved our pumpkin.
As students write, the expectations for each child may be very different. Some students will be focusing on adding details to their pictures to "show" more and label parts of their pictures. Teachers will help these students with their writing by writing what the student wants their sentence to say. Other students will be drawing a quick picture to get an idea of what they want to write and most of their writing workshop time will be spent segmenting words with teacher support. 

Reading 
Since we had a few new additions to our book box last week, we will add one more pumpkin book with an interactive vine. Then they will continue to gain mastery with all of their new books. Students who have mastered all of their new texts and are reading fluently with no teacher support will get a chance to blend words with authentic texts that are also in their book box. We have students in our class that are even taking it upon themselves to read the directions on our math worksheets- so cool!
As always, reading at home every night is highly encouraged.
Thank you!

Math  
Numbers 9 and 10 will be the focus for this week. With these numbers, students will continue to count objects in: a line, a circle, scattered formation, 5-group, and an array. 

As I mentioned last week, you will notice a lot of work with "5". We want the kids to start thinking about numbers as 5 and some more. For example, 10 is the same as 5 and 5 more. We draw a lot of 5-groups in class and the groups help students to see 5. We also use our fingers a lot because we have 5 fingers on one hand and we can add on more with our other hand.

 Plants 
In our Listening and Speaking Domain we continued to learn about plants. 
 This week we will look at pictures of blossoms that were pollinated by bees and the fruits they produced. 
On Monday we brought in several different types of fruits and we cut them open to show the seeds. Students discussed different ways pollination can occur (bees, many insects, wind)
We will also learn about Johnny Appleseed this week!
On Thursday and Friday students were reintroduced to the difference between deciduous and evergreen trees. A few weeks ago we told the kids quickly about these two types of trees and the difference between them, but this week we will have a lot of informal and formal conversations about their major differences and similarities. We will also go on a few nature walks to examine the trees.

Vocabulary your child has/will be introduced to: 
roots, stem, leaves, flower/blossom, photosynthesis, pollen, nectar, pollination, life cycle, seed, seedling, mature, decay, nutrients, produce, fruit, Johnny Appleseed, hero, orchard, scrumptious, deciduous, bare, dormant, sheds, habitat, evergreen, cones, needles and conifers.  
We do not expect students to master all of this vocabulary, but it is important that they are exposed to this language. They will now have the prior knowledge that is necessary to gain mastery in future grade levels.


On Friday we had an assembly on Stranger Safety.


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